How the FT drove digital subscriptions sales by 600 percent over Brexit weekend

By Aarthi Rayapura • June 29, 2016

Like all massive news with global ramifications, the startling Brexit outcome has caused traffic surges for most quality publishers. But to Financial Times staff, it has led to more than that; it has proved the case for quality news journalism.

The publisher dropped its paywall for all Brexit-related news for 24 hours on the eve of the vote last Thursday and naturally saw a traffic spike. It has experimented with dropping its paywall before — doing so on its 20th anniversary last year. Its motive this time around: to fulfil its journalistic duty of providing undecided voters access to both sides of the debate. Over the weekend, the FT’s Brexit poll tracker was its most-popular-ever piece of journalism, drawing nearly 4 million page views.

But people did not simply pillage its content for free and then leave over the weekend. They bought subscriptions.

In fact, the FT saw a 600 percent surge in digital subscriptions sales over the weekend (compared to the average weekend) since the Brexit vote news broke, which equated to “thousands” of additional digital subscriptions sales.